We all sit around and obsess over the yearly Academy Awards telecast, and some of you even probably waste a lot of time watching all the red carpet ceremonies in the hours before the actual Oscar telecast. But even with all the hours and hours of Oscar programming made available to us, there’s still a lot of the world’s most star-studded event that we don’t see.
One of the places I’d love to worm my way into is the Academy Award Nominees Luncheon. It’s held a couple of weeks before the actual awards are handed out, and it gathers together everyone nominated for an Oscar into one room for lunch and a little bit of hanging out. What’s really cool about it, from a complete movie geek perspective, is that they use the event as an opportunity to force all those stars onto a big set of bleachers for the Oscar equivalent of a senior picture. The result is one awesome, gigantic picture with more major movie people in one shot than you’ll ever see anywhere else. For this year’s picture you end up with the likes of Will Smith, Peter O’Toole, Penelope CruzMartin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Honsou, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Eddie Murphy, Mark Wahlberg, Jackie Earl Healy, Jennifer Hudson, and every single other talented person nominated for an Oscar this year gathered together in one big, massive, high-school-like class picture.
Check out this year’s picture below. To pick out individual celebrity faces in the big class picture, click on it for a massive, high-resolution version. It’s worth blowing up just to get a look at Peter O’Toole putting the moves on Penelope Cruz in the front row. He’s still got it.
